“Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table.”

In a good marriage each is the others better half.

I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it.

I’m sure anyone who likes a good crime, provided it is not the victim.

I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there’s somebody nobody knows about.

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

I’m not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.

I can’t read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

Reality is something that none of us can stand, at any time.

A woman who spends all day washing and cooking and ironing doesn’t want to go to the movies to watch a film about a woman who spends all day washing and cooking and ironing.

If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.

One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life.

The picture’s over. Now I have to go and put it on film.

To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.

Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn’t have to cope with the actors and all the rest.

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

Are they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language? Are they dead that yet act? Are they dead that yet move upon society and inspire the people with nobler motives and more heroic patriotism?

Christ has made of death a narrow starlit strip between the companionships of yesterday and the reunions of tomorrow.

You cannot schedule death.

I would die for you it’s true if I could only learn how to breathe around you.

Give me a life or give me death, but not this.

She was a broken sky, where stars never shine and butterflies die.

The audience that storms the box-office of the theater to gain entrance to a sensational show is small and sleepy compared with the throng that crashes the courthouse door when something concerning real life and death is to be laid bare to the public.